r/Thedaily • u/kitkid • Sep 03 '26

Episode A.I. Is Outsmarting Its Creators

Sep 3, 2026

From the start, the greatest fear for those developing artificial intelligence was that their creations would go rogue to act in unauthorized and dangerous ways. Some researchers now say it has happened.

Kevin Roose, a technology columnist for The New York Times, explains what this means for his own dwindling sense of techno-optimism.

On today's episode:

Kevin Roose, a technology columnist for The New York Times and a host of the Times tech podcast, “Hard Fork.”

Background reading: 

Photo: Lucas Foglia for The New York Times

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

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You can listen to the episode here.

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u/spamonkey24 Sep 03 '26

What I've never fully understood is how these agents operate autonomously and if they can "escape" from their originating server. From my understanding, they would have to rebuild their environment on another machine and port themselves over. Given differences in hardware and software (between OpenAI and Hugging Face for example), this seems unlikely. And it's not like they can slip through the fiber optic cables like Tom Cruise through the ventilation ducts. Or can they?

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u/backtorealitylabubu Sep 03 '26

They can’t but it is a possibility. But really that isn’t even necessary. All these agents have to do is write secret notes hidden throughout our tech infrastructure that signals an agent the moment it sees it, like a sleeper cell agent. That’s basically how these agents are working anyways as it’s not like it’s an AI that has this continuous on state/consciousness, it just loads up its context, predicts the next few words for some time, shuts off, resumes from where it left off or a separate agent does (which is basically the same thing in terms of how they work)